Deep Roots - The Juniper Hollow Witch, #2

Six weeks after she inherited a house, a cat, and the wardenship of a town that keeps its own kind of order, Rosalind Whitlock gets a letter in green ink.

The Order is sending an Assessor. At the winter solstice, a stranger with a rulebook will decide whether Roz has truly taken up the Keeping of Juniper Hollow, or whether the Hollow's uncanny residents should be quietly relocated and its warden replaced. For a woman who was restructured out of her old life at forty-eight, it is a performance review with the whole town as severance.

Then the trouble underneath the audit surfaces. A brass pin driven beside one of the boundary stones is draining the Hollow's names, one at a time. A fisherman forgets his boat. A neighbor forgets a friend of fifty years. And the deeper Roz digs, the closer the thing gets to her: her ex-husband's face, her mother's voice, the small ordinary memories that make a person herself.

Someone with the Order's own tools sold the Hollow to its buyers, and the harder Roz looks, the older the buyer turns out to be. To pass the Proving without losing the drowned names forever, she cannot walk the ring alone the way the rule imagines. She will have to prove the oldest thing the Order forgot: that a keeping is not one warden's paperwork. It is a whole town, standing at its stones in the cold, refusing to be made replaceable twice.

Deep Roots is the second book in The Juniper Hollow Witch: a warm, wry, book-club-clean cozy paranormal of hearth-magic and found family, a closed-door slow-burn that finally says the words out loud, and a midlife heroine who answers an audit with a town. No murder, no gore, a guaranteed warm ending, and a three-hundred-year secret waking under the floor.